Monday, February 27, 2006

e-Passports - Are we ready?

GCN.com

The State Department started pilot production of electronic passports earlier this month and plans to roll out e-passports for the general public this summer, officials said.

The senior official in charge of the project also said that technical issues raised recently about e-passport security would not prevent the general distribution of the documents.

Visual Design of the e-Passport

RFID Security

Eariler this month a Dutch security firm broke the security of the Dutch e-Passport pilot. They intercepted the data exchange between the RFID reader and passport, stored the encrypted data, and then cracked the password in just 2 hours on a PC giving full access to the digitized fingerprint, photograph, and all other encrypted and plain text data on the RFID tag.

The United States is suppose to use password protection on the new e-passports as well. They are even suppose to include a radio shield in the front cover, therefore reducing radio leakage when the passport is closed.

What happens if the US government issuse thousands of these RFID passports and then the encryption process is broken by some group? Will they re-design and re-issue new cards to everyone?

Does anyone make RFID blocking backpacks? or computer cases? Someone should...

Man, am I glad I just got my passport...won't need a new one for quite some time.

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